by Julian NicholasMy very good friend over the water, Michael Jackson, who’s writing always jumps off the page like a literary Art Ensemble Of Chicago, has written recently of John Coltrane that at the same time as transcending any simple emotive expressive level with his sound, lifting your very consciousness, he was a man who could also be guilty of a lack of real-time sociability and mundanity, pursuing a singular quest at the expense of the more human, corporeal or ordinary ‘participation’ that makes us what we are …..or at least, I think that’s what you were saying, Mike?Whilst anyone of Michael Brecker’s generation – Jan Gabarek included – has quite simply spent an artistic lifetime coming to terms with the giant shadow cast over their musical endeavours by the immensity of Coltrane’s artistic reach, let alone his intensely human sound, it would seem that the conversation among current tenor-touting college leavers doesn’t appear fully to engage with this challenge.I can understand this in the case of Sonny Rollins, of whom this is starkly true. I was recently left aghast upon hearing from a bunch of Royal Academy firebrands that they “hadn’t actually checked out Sonny Rollins”!! Forgiveable, I think, if only to reflect poorly on the way in which they access their music, and the general culture of acquisition rather than of process.

But in the case of Coltrane, whose very articulation and melodic construction is at the heart of the musical language of all the favourites of the young turks of the saxophone – players like Chris Potter and Seamus Blake etc., even if somewhat secondarily received through Mike Brecker, Dave Liebman or Bob Berg et all - you’d think that at least the discussion would be “Yes, we learn ‘Giant Steps’ within a context of Coltrane himself having moved on from that pathway.”Where are the college courses referencing “Coltrane, the leader of the most connected quartet of improvisers in musical history”?, or “how he created music of intensity without volume or manic activity”?, or “how he improvised collectively using one cell idea”?, or “how he articulated the content of a text in melodic phrasing”?, or “composed iconic and iconoclastic masterpieces across several genres”, or “gave meaning through the most sensitively judged vibrato among any instrumentalist or singer in jazz”? ….shall I go on?

We could look to his earlier albums, his catalogue of recordings with Miles Davis, or ‘allads, A Love Supreme’ ‘Sun Ship, or the vast output of live recordings for examples of all these approaches and embedded characteristics of his masterly musicianship. So how do we resolve why the elephant in the music classroom, both sides of the Atlantic, is John Coltrane. {see what I …?}

When interviewed by Russell Davis for his Coltrane TV documentary in the 90s, Elvin Jones said two very significant things: the first was his very real conviction that “John is still here”, and the other was that on recording dates and gigs there was very little discussion before playing, right down to the new material, which not only was barely scored out, but in effect was part composed on the spot, during the performance or recording, in some cases.On the first point, Jones is describing the real and personal presence and impact of Coltrane upon him – something that will never leave him – referring to Coltrane as “an angel, if you have that belief, and it has made me think very seriously about that”. But isn’t he also talking about how Coltrane’s musical development, right to the end, showed a potential path into a collective ecstasy and raw creativity that has yet to be fully realised? That Coltrane is still present in everything jazz musicians do, precisely because he fully realised the American songbook (just listen to his take of ‘Like Someone In Love’ from “lush Life’, for instance), the ii-V-I chord-based originals, the blues, the drone, and had set off in the direction of the fully collective ‘community’, or almost ‘folk’ communion of sound?He is still with us because in 12 years he burned brightly through the post-Parker possibilities to arrive at resonances with which we still haven’t come to terms.

On Jones’s second point, that they had some kind of ESP, this was also true of the early days – both with Miles’ studio explorations, and with John’s initial great solo recordings such as ‘Naima’, which in part was developed on the spot from a scant chart. ‘Dear Lord’ from ‘Transition’, for example, is an unabashed diatonic and lyrical prayer of devotion, or an open channel into which all four musicians had tuned, with the outcome of a freshly-generated form of an extended dominant augmented chord of expectation at the end of each middle-eight.These extensions are achieved through the listening within the group, just as is the un-pulsed forward motion of ‘Welcome’ from Expression.

But to return to the question: what makes this un-teachable, or scantly referenced in academic environments? Is it because no-one can be directed to ‘like’ an artist enough for them to spend hours working through the sheer volume of material needed to comprehend the overarching journey? Is it because teaching in general suffers from having to have archetypes for each genre or idiom? Surely the answer has something to do with consumerism, as opposed to process. If the employment of one strategy is more likely to give rise to a ‘product’, why put other dynamic musical and intellectual challenges in the way? Why study ‘Giant Steps’ in order to question how to develop the notion of the sequential pattern beyond the confines of the chord sequence, when academics and a plethora of websites posit it as an end point, a means unto itself, the process being superficially challenging enough?It really isn’t possible to characterise Coltrane’s expressive reach by any one of his several developmental periods. He was searching, not arriving at an end point, when he was so pre-emptively taken from this world in 1967. Indeed it seems his awareness of his proximity to death accelerated his creative process, his openness to an inclusive and expansive sound unconcerned with the constructs of Western classicism. It is galling to hear some jazz fans rule Coltrane out for his ‘sheets of sound’ or freer excursions, betraying as they do so their lack of awareness of the inestimable work of one of music’s creative leaders. Such is the elusive nature of his achievement in a world seeking the explainable, the instantly gratifying, that he remains the least cited example for a greater understanding of the evolution of jazz. Rather than turning in his grave, however, he is perhaps smiling wryly down on it all, if you believe that sort of thing!

ECM celebrates 50 years of music production with the Touchstones series of re-issues